Why I advocate for Opinion to be in its own section on Daily Kos
I've posted over 1,400 stories on the liberal website Daily Kos so it caught my attention when the site was referred to in a Washington Post article:
Republicans are increasingly sharing misinformation, research finds - subscription)
Measuring misinformation on social media is complicated. With billions of posts per day on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it would be impossible to examine each one for misinformation. Instead, to approximate the level of misinformation shared by political candidates, we relied on NewsGuard, a nonpartisan organization that provides trust ratings for news sources online.
NewsGuard uses several point-based criteria to assess a site’s credibility and transparency, giving each site a score from 0 to 100 based on how well it adheres to those standards. NewsGuard considers those rated at 60 and above, which include such sources as The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN, to be reliable news sites. It considers those rated under 60, which include Breitbart and Daily Kos, to be unreliable.
I was curious about this and found an exchange with Steve Brill from NewsGuard and the Daily Kos founder here.
Comparing Breitbart with Daily Kos is absurd. The former promotes nothing but lies and distortions from the far right including outright conspiracy theories. Kos is a mixed bag as a website because it has two types of articles, those by members of the staff, often reporting straight news, and those by community members. This later group is a mix of stories about news generally with excerpts from other publications and sometimes, but not always, with the opinion of the diarist included. The other group of community diarist stories are those that are mostly original ideas and thoughts and sometimes offering information about subjects like Trump's psychopathology which I have written about.
The assortment of news and opinion on Daily Kos enriches the website, but I think it can be confusing and seem like a hodgepodge.
I propose a change to the way Daily Kos is setup to clearly differentiate pure opinion and original information essays from posts from contributors which share news stories. I'd like to see Kos have an opinion section the way The New York Times and The Washington Post does. The Times and Post opinion sections include essays by staff columnists and guest contributors. There are also satirical columns some of which make me wonder why I ever try to write satire. Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri, both Washington Post columnists, often mix in biting satirical pieces with their straight opinion columns.
(Click images of Aug. 29 websites from the Times and Post below to enlarge to see how their opinion columns appear.)